Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Monday February 16, 2009 @02:15PM
from the don't-go-the-way-of-the-novell-bird dept.

mjasay writes "For years Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge its patent portfolio as a precursor to interoperability discussions. Today, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. The nuts-and-bolts of the agreement are somewhat pedantic, providing for Red Hat to validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and other technical support details. But the real crux of the agreement is what isn't there: patents. Red Hat has long held that open standards and open APIs are the key to interoperability, even as Microsoft insisted patents play a critical role in working together, and got Novell to buy in. Today, Red Hat's vision seems to have won out with an interoperability deal heavy on technical integration and light on lawyers."

...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".

On a lighter note, wonder what the VMware guys are thinking about all of this - it's basically the end of what has always been their niche, except for Parallels but they weren't as datacenter-ready as VMware and were established mainly to make virtualization software that can run OS/2.

...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".

Because people, especially bussiness people that sign checks, still like (or dont know any better) some MS products.

Some other people have vested investment in MS based things and they are not going (nor they should if the industry can prevent it by DOING ITS JOB) to spend it all over again so that they can feel nice about themselves.

Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given...there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide

Even if that were true, in practice companies don't just swap out production environments because alternatives potentially exist. What works well for you may be problematic in even a slightly different environment. Others have mentioned apps for which OSS interoperability isn't there yet, and I'd add Group Policies and other AD centric tech to the list (although I admittedly haven't checked out recent versions of Samba lately, so maybe I'm wrong on that). I'm as big of an OSS advocate as there is, but part of advocating effectively is knowing where limitations exist and dealing with them rationally rather than sugar-coating them. I agree with the gist of what you're saying though, and there are a lot of shops that could lower TCO by exploring the alternatives.

How does this qualify as "neutralizing?" RHT gave up nothing. F/OSS doesn't suffer at all. This is no different from making RHEL work with any other third party closed source technology like Oracle or SAP. RHT and MSFT have simply recognized that there is a need for this interoperability, but RHT basically forced MSFT's hand and MSFT backed down. This is, if anything, a huge victory for F/OSS.

IF Red Hat had squat for mature virtualization, it might make a difference. RH is behind, way behind, and it's a nice gesture, good for the press, and RH has lost out to VMWare, Novell's Xen product line, Citrix's XenServer, and even xVM/VB.

It sounds sweet, but it's a meaningless sort of announcement in the face of a ton of mature competition.

That solution is quite interesting, because its the sort of thing that a lot of people were expecting to happen - virtual images being used as black-box applications.

I love the idea of being able to download a webserver in a box, or a caching HTTP proxy server. There are many other applications which would be nice to see provided like this. Of course in my case I would be hosting them on Linux, but I guess whatever host machine you use is irrelevant so long as you understand it and can support it.

Of course I'm a little biased when it comes to spam filtering [mail-scanning.com], but I hope the idea of custom VM images catchs on more generally.

There are downsides such as the overhead of emulating a whole machine for a single service, but I'm sure the benefits outweigh them if you have spare host capacity (*2 for redundancy)

I'm curious though, did you configure the guest yourself, or find it as a pre-rolled virtual machine image?

We are 3+ years on after the signing of the Novell/MSFT deal and there has been zero legal action by Ballmer and his cronies.

Nobody in the know were really worried about actual legal action. What people were actually worried about was that Microsoft's patent threats might be scaring away people from FOSS.

What the Novell/Microsoft deal primarily did was to lend credibility in the eyes of some people that to use many FOSS packages, you needed a patent license from Microsoft. The same applies to Linspire, Xandros, and the rest of those that actually signed patent deals with Microsoft over FOSS.

I'm curious though, did you configure the guest yourself, or find it as a pre-rolled virtual machine image?

I ultimately rolled it myself. Partly as a learning exercise, and partly because none of the pre-rolled VMs were quite what I needed. And I didn't know enough to reconfigure them to work the way I needed. (Although now, having rolled my own, I probably could customize a pre-rolled VM.)

There are downsides such as the overhead of emulating a whole machine for a single service, but I'm sure the benefits outweigh them if you have spare host capacity (*2 for redundancy)

Yeah, the overhead of emulating a whole machine is the downside, but the advantages in terms of flexibility, service isolation, and simplicity are clear.

I didn't say that Photoshop isn't overrated, or that it isn't overpriced. I don't know that either of these allegations are true, but I wouldn't rule them out.

But, the fact is, and it sounds like you agree, that Photoshop has quite a few features that the Gimp doesn't, features that a number of us find useful. And even if I agree with you that 90% of users don't need these features, that leaves 10% of us who do.

And this is not to mention the rather shop-worn UI issue.

Again, I love the Gimp and have nothing but respect for the people who make it. I use it daily and would be the first in line to shake the developers' hands if they ever were to dethrone Photoshop as the king of photo-manipulation software. Its just that, today, they aren't there yet. Many tasks remain that are either only possible or much easier in Photoshop.

Not only that, but lots of businesses run SPECIFIC software packages where switching over is a $100k+ expense just in the data conversion. And of course there's the little issue that yeah, Linux provides plenty of alternatives for your average desktop user, but not your whacky business programs that places tend to use. I've still yet to see a Linux or F/OSS product meant to do CAMA (Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal) functions, or manage building permits and subdivision planning, handle the calculating and billing of property taxes, to handle the filling of veterans benefits claims, or to track the progress of police K-9 unit training. That's just my own requirements working in a government environment, but each particular industry presents it's own challenges, and the open source world often just has nothing to offer there because those programs are often so obscure that unless you needed it you'd never even think of it, and most importantly: the software is generally pretty boring, and few volunteers will write that type of software.

Trust me, if it was possible I'd switch to Linux wherever I can - lately though I've found that beyond the email gateway, the file server, and the web server, most of my servers just have to run Windows due to the software that they must run.

Didn't say one was necessarily better than the other, if you'll read my post. RH hasn't been a leader. They're playing ketchup right now.

As far as my 'ignorance' is concerned, take a real look at which each vendor is offering. Sun is also way behind in mindshare, and perfection of their offering, while solid, hasn't exactly captured mainstream fancy. Xen performance is absolutely different as currently provided/supported by each vendor, and that's well documented.

Novell's Xen seems to be slowest, while Citrix's XenServer is fastest where it counts. And each version is absolutely different than the next. It's like saying that a specific distro, because it's based on 2.6.XY must always be exactly like any other distro based on 2.6.XY. Indeed the Xen derivatives aren't based on the same version, and their performance results are completely different as well.